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4/20 Multimedia on the Web Real multimedia Web content is still rare –Mostly bells & whistles to enhance HTML text … –… or mono-media AV-streams Virtually all presentations are hand-authored –proprietary formats that are hard to generate –limited support for dynamic content and multichanneling –most Web technology is text/page-oriented … –… with SMIL as one of the few exceptions Conclusion: Multimedia has hardly caught up with the 1st generation Web!

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6/20 But multimedia is not text... Different document and presentation abstractions –hard to separate style from structure Formatting is not based on text flow –no pages or scrollbars, no line-breaking or hyphenation –templates often do not work well either Feedback from the formatting back-end required –need to check whether proposed layout is feasible –layout of media items is less flexible than text-based layout Transformations are hard in a functional language –need to try out designs and backtrack when necessary

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8/20 Solution (our approach) The creation of a web-based infrastructure that is –an extension of the current document engineering perspective –taking into account the graphic design perspective

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9/20 Document Engineering Perspective Content is selected & structured Mappings are defined to a new presentation structure Styles (such as color and font) can be applied The transformation process is linear Assume that –Content/document structure, –presentation structure and, –style are independent of each other.

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18/20 Cuypers Web Embedding Prolog-based engine embedded in Apache XML-based input/output stream Java servlets for XML to Prolog translation … but all knowledge is implicit and hidden in the rules lost in the generated Web presentation not reusable for other Web sites